People On The Internet Can’t Read

A little while back I downloaded Google Talk on to my beloved BlackBerry 8830. It’s a great little piece of software that gives me all of my normal Google Talk functionalities: status, chats, saves the chat histories to my account, and so on.

Now, here’s the problem. I downloaded the program and set it up with my editors that every night I go to bed, log in on my phone, and set my status to “Sleeping/msgs fwd to phone”. (I hate text speech, but it’s needed here) The idea was that I have bosses all over the planet, I actually do not blog for anyone who lives in the United States, so sometimes they need to reach me at odd hours. Since it’s a work situation, I am perfectly okay with them waking me up to say “Hey, your article needs an imge corrected” or “Can you rework piece X?”

However, the problem is my friends have decided I’m not actually sleeping, and just being a lazy butt that hasn’t changed his status. I have been woken up several mornings now, well before my alarm going off, to “Hey, Sean, are you asleep?”… No, my status message says that for fun… My answers are usually the Internet equivalent of a grunt, and then they continue to talk since I am obviously awake… YOU WOKE ME UP!

I have spoken all the friends who have done this, and vowed not to repeat their transgressions, but it got me to thinking about other things, such as are we TOO connected now? It’s nice to be able to log in once in awhile to check on things, but with all of the abilities to stay connected now, it’s like I lways have a tether on my leg.

Yes, I realize I could just turn it off, but I feel with the international flavor of my bosses, I have made the right choice to let them get a hold of me. Now if I could just get all of my friends to believe my status message a bit more so I could get some sleep! It’s the Internet folks, I would assume you know how to read!

(and, as a note to the few who have done it, we’ve talked and you know I’m not THAT annoyed… just slightly)